An automated solid municipal waste processing complex has opened in Tomsk.

The concession agreement for the construction of the facility was signed between the regional Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection, the Tomsk Regional Concession Company, and Sberbank in April 2023. At that time, the project was estimated to cost 2.4 billion rubles. After the approval of the design and estimate documentation, the investment amount increased to 3.8 billion.

Construction work began in March 2024 and took about a year. In May 2025, a permit for the complex's occupancy was issued, and in June, a license for operations was received.

"The design period for constructing similar facilities is over two years, but despite difficulties with material supplies, we built the Siberian Concentration and Production Association in just one year without any loss of quality. No other complex of this size in the country has been built in such a short timeframe. The general contractor did a tremendous job, and construction proceeded virtually around the clock," noted Dmitry Mitasov, CEO of Tomsk Regional Concession Company.

The high-tech equipment was manufactured by the Nizhny Novgorod Central Research Institute "Burevestnik," which already has experience supplying waste sorting facilities in the Sergiev Posad District and the city of Mozhaisk in the Moscow Region.

The waste processing plant is located near the northern site of the Tomsk Industrial Park in the closed administrative-territorial entity of Seversk. It operates on a two-shift schedule and accepts municipal solid waste from Tomsk, Seversk, and the Tomsk District of the region, which accounts for approximately 80 percent of the 300,000 tons of waste generated annually in the region. Regional operators will deliver the waste to the Sibir waste processing plant.

The equipment allows for the selection of over 50 percent of waste from the total waste stream that can be recycled. Of this, 14.6 percent is planned for shipment to Russian recycling plants: cardboard and paper to Kemerovo and Biysk, polyethylene to Omsk, PET to Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, and Gus-Khrustalny, and metals and glass to Novosibirsk. Another nearly 40 percent of the collected organic waste will be converted directly in Tomsk into industrial soil, which can be used for landfill reclamation and reclamation, as well as as fill for abandoned quarries, including those formed during mining operations, as well as in construction and agriculture.

The planned parameters for processing waste into useful raw materials will exceed the current indicators in the Tomsk region by almost a hundred times.

"We're solving an environmental problem with economic benefits," Governor Vladimir Mazur emphasized at the opening ceremony of the Siberia waste management enterprise. "Waste recycling will allow us to send recyclable materials for advanced processing, launching separate production facilities for building materials, plastic products, and other industries. We're already considering nearby land plots for the development of a corresponding industrial cluster."

Direct speech

Vladimir Mazur, Governor of Tomsk Oblast:

The Sibir waste processing complex, the most high-tech facility east of the Urals, has been launched under the "Environmental Well-Being" national project. The new facility already accepts waste from Tomsk, Seversk, and the Tomsk region—approximately seven hundred tons per day. The design capacity of the Sibir waste processing complex is 250,000 tons per year. However, with the equipment's reconfiguration, this can be increased to three hundred thousand. This means that municipal waste from other municipalities in the region can be recycled. We are working on this. The new facility will allow us to halve the volume of waste we send to landfills. This is a significant contribution to environmental protection and care. And, of course, it creates the conditions for improved waste disposal.